KARACHI: The city of Karachi that had the pleasure of witnessing an exhibition of chrysanthemum every year over the last 40 years, will not be able to see it this year only because this mega city has been divided into 18 parts. The horticultural directorate has also been divided into tiny ineffective units, all of which are incapable of pooling their wealth.
Experts that produced floral wonders in the past still exist but have been left with no inspiration or motivation to bloom various seasonal flowers, no more so the chrysanthemum that was considered the Queen of flowers in the floral world for over 1,000 years.
The loss of this distinguished symbol of nature has not dwindled the glory and pride of the East. Japan has made it her national flower. China, where it was brought up from infancy to maturity in the last 3,000 years, has held it dearly in memory and in living form as one of the floral treasures which is raised, revered and loved as before in parks, in homes, in botanical gardens, in ancient pagodas, in museums, in boulevards and roundabouts to bolster the mood of people embarking on their daily chores, of mothers who stroll children to teach them the beauty of nature, to instil in them the aesthetic values to remember that flowers have to be loved and not neglected. They symbolize the magnanimity of nature for mankind.
Residents of Islamabad and Lahore love their cities, their flowers and the magic that these bounties of nature emanate to lift the soul and spirit, to dispel the stigma of Islamabad being designated as the city of dead. Lahore rears them, exhibits them annually, with aplomb with which this great, historical city has been famous for. It is impossible that Lahoriites will forgive the city administration if they avoided exhibiting these mildly fragrant and highly decorative delicacies regularly.
They celebrate them all with religious fervour, including displaying their chrysanthemums and keeping parks colourful, fragrant.
Karachi is now turning into a filthy rich city that has been losing its love to preserve nature in its entirety. They plan big gardens that are never completed or beautified. There are hundreds of them without boundary walls where urchins play in dust and mire, dogs howl at night to announce that Karachi is soulless.
The scribe has been forecasting for the last three years that chrysanthemums were at the door of death, but none in the townships including the City Nazim has made his directorate of horticulture to improve floral might.